by Hugo Wilcken
Essentially, the less coke Bowie did, the more he drank. One waiter at a Kurfürstendamm beer house remembers him throwing up in the gutter after drinking a gallon of König-Pilseners. “Virtually every time I saw him in Berlin, he was drunk, or working on getting drunk,” Angie Bowie wrote in her biography. She’d turn up in Berlin unexpectedly, throwing Bowie into a state of emotional turmoil. During one of those visits, an anxiety attack had Bowie thinking he had heart problems and he wound up spending the night in a hospital. “I couldn’t understand why he’d gone to Berlin. He never asked me if I wanted to live there. It never once occurred to David to stay at home with Zowie and me. His boredom threshold was too intense to live with. He swung from genius to the erratic without warning.” It all came to a dramatic head when, in a jealous rage, Angie demanded that Bowie fire his assistant, Corinne Schwab. When Bowie refused, Angie tried to burn Corinne’s room, then slashed her clothes and threw them out onto the street along with the bed, and caught the next flight out of Berlin. Angie and Bowie would only meet one more time, to exchange legal documents relating to their divorce.
Berlin was an island, cut off from the world, but big enough to get lost in as well. Each layer of the Berlin myth seemed to reflect something in the Bowie persona—the Expressionist artists; the cabaret decadence; the Nazi megalomania; the cataclysmic destruction; the isolation behind the Wall; the Cold War depression; the ghosts who never depart. Above all, Berlin wasn’t quite real. Its military zones, the bullet-holes still pockmarking the edifices, the watch-towers, Speer’s megalithic relics, the bombed-out buildings next to shiny new ones, the huge black tanks that rumbled along the streets …as Visconti put it, “You could have been on the set of The Prisoner.”
do you remember that dream?
Low’s second side represents a drastic mood change. The nervy, fragmented art-funk gives way to four longer, slower textural pieces that descend into mutism. Because Bowie deliberately divided Low’s tracks up in the way he did, rather than scatter these “ambient” pieces throughout the album, it’s hard not to read off a structural metanarrative. On the one hand, the division reflects split mentalities; on the other, the second side becomes the logical consequence of the first. In that respect, the album bears some similarities to Joy Division’s Closer, which is not a concept album, but one where the sequencing leads us somewhere ever darker as we progress. The jittery psychosis of Low’s first side describes a mindset that could have led somewhere equally suicidal (just as The Idiot signed off with the terminally morbid “Mass Production”). But although the second side’s pieces are soaked in melancholy, they are neither suicidal nor entirely nihilistic. There’s even something vaguely uplifting about the first three. They are, however, profoundly solipsistic. The autism and retreat of the first side’s lyrics find their wordless counterpart here as the music lifts off and spins into inner orbit, free from external reference points. Like the landscapes of the Brücke artists, the four pieces superficially describe a place (Warsaw on the first track, Berlin on the other three), but that place is really just a prompt, just a vehicle for a mood. And in the case of “Warszawa,” Bowie was only in Warsaw for a matter of hours, while changing trains. If this is a portrait of a city, as the title implies, it is painted with the broadest of brushstrokes.
“Warszawa” is the only piece on the album where Eno shares writing credits (although oddly he’s also co-credited with “Art Decade” on the Stage live album). Its genesis is that Bowie simply told Eno he wanted a slow piece with a very emotive, almost religious feel to it. Eno suggested they begin by laying down a track with 430 metronome clicks (the same method was used for “Art Decade” and “Weeping Wall”). It gave them a sort of pulse to improvise over, rather than falling into a more conventional 3/4 or 4/4 time signature. It’s a pulse that bears resemblances to the minimalist “groove” used by composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Once they had around seven minutes of clicks on tape, Visconti would then call out the click numbers on another track. That enabled them to construct the piece: there were no bars of music, just chords and sections coming in and overlapping at randomly picked click numbers, like at click 59 for instance. The technique gave the piece room to breathe, without the conventional constrictions of two-, four- or eight-bar phrasing. They used the Roland and Yamaha keyboards that were at hand at the Château studios, plus Eno’s EMS synth and Bowie’s chamberlain (a version of the tape-based mellotron sampling keyboard). A piano and guitar were also used, although they were heavily treated by Visconti.
Almost all the instrumental work was done by Eno alone while Visconti was accompanying Bowie to Paris, where he had to attend court hearings against his former manager. Eno: “Rather than wasting the studio time I decided to start a piece on my own, with the understanding that if he didn’t like it I’d pay for the studio time and use it myself.” Visconti’s son Delaney had a hand in the proceedings as well. One afternoon, the four-year-old was sitting at the studio piano playing the notes A, B, C over and over again. Eno sat next to him and completed the melody which would become the “Warszawa” theme.
On Bowie’s return from Paris, Eno played him what he’d come up with. “As soon as David heard it he said, ‘Get me a mike,’” Eno recalled in 1995. “He’s very fast when he gets going, really a brilliant singer—I don’t think people realise how finely he can tune his singing, in terms of picking a particular emotional pitch: it’s really scientific the way he does it, very interesting. He’ll say, ‘I think that’s slightly too theatrical there, it should be more withdrawn and introspective’—and he’ll go in and sing it again, and you’ll hear this point-four of a degree shift which makes all the difference.… He picks up the mood of a musical landscape, such as the type I might make, and he can really bring it to a sharp focus, both with the words he uses and the style of singing he chooses.”
Bowie came up with the words in about ten minutes, according to Visconti. He had a record with him of a Balkan boys’ choir that he liked, and he wanted to do something with the same feeling. Visconti slowed down the tape by two semitones for Bowie to sing the high-pitched part, so that when played back normally he sounded like a young choir boy. The words are in a made-up language that sounds vaguely Eastern European, vaguely ethnic, and very atmospheric, as though from both the distant past and the distant future. There’s perhaps a connection with Dadaist sound poetry, and its links to Primitivism and Expressionism (Eno would sample sound poet Kurt Schwitters on “Before and after Science” the following year). In any case, doing away with the semantic on this track and on “Subterraneans” is a masterstroke, giving these songs the eerie sense of watching a movie in a foreign language, where you can feel all the different moods without understanding the plot. It follows the Expressionist principle, where the object painted might almost be anything, as the colours and brushstrokes obliterate it to reflect the inner state. The “nothing to say” of “Sound and Vision” finds its true expression and meaning on the second side of Low.
“Warszawa” is a slow, tolling piece that reminds me a little of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s mournful “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” (1977). It starts with bare octaves in A, followed by a modal melody also in octaves, then modulates to D-sharp minor in the main section of the piece. Bowie’s heartfelt, nonsense singing doesn’t come in until well over halfway through, at 4:05, before giving way to the main theme again. The piece doesn’t fade out, but it doesn’t have an ending either, it just stops in its tracks at some point. Despite this, and the planned randomness of its construction, a sense of deep structure does eventually emerge from the track. Some critics have written off the second side of Low as Eno’s work, but I think the careful structuring of this track and its harmonies actually show something of a Bowie influence on Eno, whose own ambient pieces tend to be less compositional, less interested in harmony, and in general less teleological.
“Warszawa’s” introductory piano drone bears more than a passing resemblance to the intro of
Scott Walker’s mesmerising, psycho-sexual meditation on torture, “The Electrician,” recorded the following year (and described by Bowie as “one of the most astonishing performances in popular music”). Scott Walker is another Bowie touchstone, and, like Kraftwerk, another of those artists whose careers seem to intertwine with Bowie’s. Back in the sixties, Bowie had already heard Walker’s existential solo albums, and more particularly his versions of Jacques Brel songs. Bowie’s own Brel recordings (“My Death” and “Amsterdam”) were much more Walker than Brel, and used the same loose translations by Mort Schuman. Walker’s career floundered for most of the seventies but in 1977 he wrote and sang four songs on the Walker Brothers album Nite Flights that move into very similar territory to Bowie’s Low and “Heroes”, mixing funk/disco beats with dissonant synths, scratchy guitar and fragmented lyrics of a modernist bent (“The Electrician” is a sort of update of Joseph Conrad’s Mr Kurtz). Walker had heard Low before embarking on his own darkly experimental tracks, and he sent Bowie a copy of Nite Flights on its release in early 1978, despite the fact that the two had never met. Bowie was enthused; a couple of years later he offered Walker his services as a producer, but it seems Walker turned him down (he later went into the studios with Eno, but ultimately nothing came of that project). Much later, Bowie recorded his own version of “Nite Flights” on Black Tie White Noise (1993). More recently, he has talked up Scott Walker’s operatic Tilt (1995)—a late, fascinating entry into the modernist canon.
all that fall
“Art Decade” was started at the Château but completed at Hansa studios. Bowie has said that it is about West Berlin, “a city cut off from its world, art and culture, dying with no hope of retribution.” Actually it doesn’t sound as depressed as that, although instrumentally and texturally it does leave that impression of a world caught just before it disappears, with the constant descent of the main theme and the odd, almost organic-sounding electronic effects that drop pitch then fade. The title puns on “decayed” but also evokes “art deco,” and the sense of nostalgia for the elegant innocence of an age just before the cataclysm of the trenches. A cello part, scored by Visconti and played by the album’s sound engineer Eduard Meyer, adds warmth to this luminous track that recalls the work of Harmonia and the early, more pastoral Kraftwerk.
According to Eno, “Art Decade” “started off as a little tune [Bowie] played on the piano. Actually we both played it because it was for four hands, and when we’d finished it he didn’t like it very much and sort of forgot about it. But as it happened, during the two days he was gone I finished the one piece [‘Warszawa’] and then dug that out to see if I could do anything with it. I put all those instruments on top of what we had, and then he liked it and realised there was hope for it, and he worked on top of that, adding more instruments. In fact, ‘Art Decade’ is my favourite track of all.” The piece starts off with an enigmatic, muffled intro that sounds like it’s coming from somewhere very far away. The main modal motif makes an abrupt entrance, is repeated several times, and then is freeze-framed on a four-note figure, mesmerically repeated over and over again, as though a fade-out was imminent, although it’s not.
That endless repetition with very slight changes is reminiscent of minimalist composer Philip Glass, and minimalism’s foregrounding of repetition and texture over melodic complication. Indeed, Low’s whole second side shows a minimalist influence, which was already apparent on Station to Station (not just in the title track but also in the taut repetitions of “Golden Years”). And Glass is yet another of those artists with whom Bowie has had intertwining musical relations. Bowie had seen Glass’s Music for Changing Parts in 1971, and the two had met not long after and became friendly. At the time of making Low, Bowie was certainly listening to Glass—and vice versa, as Glass himself testifies: “I remember talking to David at the time and was impressed to hear that Low was meant to be part of a trilogy. I’d never encountered pop music conceived with that level of artistic ambition. I thought at the time I’d like to do something with that material, but didn’t carry the thought any further.” Although the gestation period was long, he did eventually carry it further. His Low Symphony, based on three pieces from the album (“Subterraneans,” “Some Are” [a Low outtake] and “Warszawa”), was written in the spring of 1992 and came out in 1993. Personally, I find what Glass did with Low a disappointment, and I say that as a fan of Glass’s work. He essentially takes Bowie’s and Eno’s melody lines, “Glassifies” them and orchestrates them in a pretty conventional fashion. Glass seems to miss the point that what makes Low interesting is its studio-based nature. In this case, you can’t successfully divorce the music from the processes that made it, because by doing that you take out the most distinctive ingredient. Nonetheless, the experiment underlines the bootstrapping relationship between pop and minimalism. Because although minimalism is a clear influence on Low, popular music itself had a strong influence on minimalism. The minimalist “groove” is classical music’s equivalent of a pop beat, and the repetitions and simplified melodic structures also recall the strictures of the three-minute single of the late fifties or early sixties.
“Art Decade’s” “freeze-framed” repetitions aren’t resolved but work themselves up into a slow-burning, restrained climax, before unexpectedly giving way to the main theme again, cutting directly in to the four-note figure. Bowie and Eno used the metronome click technique on this track as well, and the randomness of the sequence changes works to good effect. That jolt of the return is almost the opposite of what Eno achieved on the ambient pieces of Another Green World, and is in fact rather at odds with the whole notion of “ambient” music. And the reappearance of the main theme brings the piece to a close with a certain symmetry that is again more the compositional mark of Bowie than Eno.
pulsations
The shimmering “Weeping Wall” is the only piece on the album that was entirely recorded in Berlin. And it is of course “about the Berlin Wall—the misery of it,” although the title also echoes Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, with its similar connotations of exile and lamentation. It’s an all-Bowie affair—he plays every instrument on the track, and Eno has said he had nothing to do with its creation.
It’s also the track that is most marked by minimalism—to the extent that it could almost pass as a Steve Reich composition. It bears a lot of similarities with the pulse sections of Reich’s seminal “Music for 18 Musicians.” I was very surprised to learn that the Reich work wasn’t released on record by ECM until 1978, well after Low, but a little research reveals that it had its European première in Berlin, in October 1976—in other words the same month Bowie was making “Weeping Wall.” Reich confirms that Bowie was at that concert. Sometimes credited as the progenitor of sampling, Reich is a good illustration of the way minimalism and popular music have mutually enriched one another. From a 1999 interview: “Cut to 1974, and my ensemble is giving a concert in London, and when the concert’s over a young man with long hair comes up and looks at me and says, ‘How do you do, I’m Brian Eno.’ Two years later we’re in Berlin and David Bowie’s there, and I think to myself, ‘This is great, this is poetic justice.’ I’m the kid sitting at the bar listening to Miles Davis, listening to John Coltrane, and now these people are listening to me!”
The Reich piece and “Weeping Wall” share a similar sonic quality thanks to the mix of wordless chanting, xylophones and particularly a vibraphone that Bowie found abandoned at the Hansa studio (it’s a type of marimbaphone that creates a special vibrato, invented by Herman Winterhoff in 1916). The effect has the flavour of Javanese gamelan (traditional Indonesian orchestras that use a similar instrument to the vibraphone) and adds to the generic “ethnic” feel of the second side, initiated with Bowie’s faux-Eastern wailings on “Warszawa.” Both “Weeping Wall” and “Music for 18 Musicians” privilege a sort of pulsation rather than a more conventional rhythm, aiming at a certain “stillness in motion.” Reich’s interest at this stage was in harmony and tonal quali
ty rather than melodic construction—mirroring Bowie’s and Eno’s own textural leanings at the time. There is little sign of melody in the Reich pulse pieces, just a series of slight harmonic changes that occur at certain intervals, often just inversions of minor to major chords or vice versa. But there is a brief melody line on “Weeping Wall,” although it’s of secondary importance to the pulse and texture of the instrumentation. It’s played at first on Bowie’s ARP then repeated with variations vocally as a chant. Actually, it’s the first few notes of “Scarborough Fair” repeated over and over. The borrowing may well be unintentional, but it does add a certain pastoral mysticism to the track.
Where “Weeping Wall” veers away from Reich is its playing of organic sounds (percussive instruments, vocals) off the harsher synthetic ones—one of Low’s key musical strategies. With the backing track of bubbling xylophone and vibraphone sounds down, Bowie once again used the metronome click method to randomly introduce chants and hums, synths and a distorted guitar riff to give the piece a distinctive flavour. Although there’s a sense of mysterious yearning to the track, there’s also a playful lightness and energy in there. It has a distance to it but doesn’t feel particularly depressive to me, and its connection with the miseries of the Berlin Wall aren’t overly apparent. In keeping with the other tracks of this side, though, you can’t really escape its inwardness, and the feeling of listening to the soundtrack of images forever locked inside someone else’s brain. And like just about every other track on the album, it has no real ending, but simply fades out at a seemingly random moment.